Recently, vehicle safety has become a much more important factor in vehicle manufacture, and accordingly, techniques for determining a head position of a driver have garnered strong interest. For instance, the head position of the driver may act as an important parameter in an algorithm for controlling operation of an air bag.
In one known way of determining the head position of the driver according to the related art utilizes the position of the driver's seat in a front and rear direction. A sensor may be used for detecting a seat position of a seat moving track, and on the basis of the output of the sensor, the head position of the driver may be estimated. Such an estimate, however, may result in rough measurement of the head position.
For example, the head position of the driver may vary at the same seat position, according to how much a seat back is inclined, and/or the posture of the driver. Therefore, sufficient accuracy and/or precision may not be expected from such a method of determining the head position of the driver.
One of the ways that may be expected to show enhanced precision/accuracy is through disposing a camera in an interior of the vehicle and calculating the head position of the driver from an image obtained by the camera. However, this approach may only be enabled by adopting a stereo camera or at least two normal cameras, which results in an excessive increase of manufacturing cost of the vehicle.
The information disclosed in this Background of the Invention section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and should not be taken as an acknowledgement or any form of suggestion that this information forms the prior art that is already known to a person skilled in the art.